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Perhaps I’m just not Mac-savvy enough, but as far as I can tell, iTunes offers no good way to manage and arrange your music in full album groups — which is a pain, because, like the cranky rockist relic I am, I tend to listen to albums all the way through from beginning to end.

So here’s my (admittedly frivolous and probably a little whiny) question: Is there a quick way to see what the most recent albums I’ve added are, and then pull them out into playlists with their track orders intact, but perhaps rearrange the order of the album? Using the date added column to sort tracks shows me my recent additions, but almost never arranges those tracks in proper album order, especially with MP3s that I’ve ripped from my CD collection onto other computers (a lot of my music). So if I move them into a playlist, I then have to manually rearrange them (clicking the album column album doesn’t let you then decide which order you want the albums to play).

The quickest way I can see to do what I want requires:
1) bringing up my most recently added albums using the date added column
2) typing in enough of the album name to isolate it
3) clicking “album” so that it resorts into correct order
4) moving the songs in that order into a playlist
5) repeating these four steps for each album I want to add.

Sure, this is an incredibly trivial thing by almost any measure, but it seems awfully silly that there’s no one-step way to simply grab albums and stick them in order to be played. You’d think there would be some sort of toggle that would allow you to quickly move albums as groups. I can’t be the only music nerd out there who’s resisted the singles revolution!

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If you’re using iTunes 8, you should be able to view your library and playlists in “Grid View”, which you can organize by Album, Artist, Genre, or Composer, with various lower-level sorting options under the hood.

In short, go to your “Recently Added” playlist or what-have-you, click View >> As Grid, toggle the “Album” option, then click-and-drag the desired album to the desired playlist.